The renowned astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked on a variety of pathbreaking problems in his lifetime. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983 for formulating theories for the creation of the ‘white dwarf’ as the hydrogen fuel of stars of a certain size runs out. The Infosys-ICTS Chandrasekhar Lecture Series are delivered by eminent physicists. The first lecture in any series is aimed at a general audience, while the remaining are targeted at specialists.
Past Lectures
Robert Myers (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada)
10 December 2014, 16:00 to 17:00
Physics Auditorium, IISc campus, Bangalore
In science, we often see new advances and insights emerging from the intersection of different ideas coming from what appeared to be disconnected research areas. The theme of my colloquium will be an ongoing collision between the three ideas listed in my title which has been generating interesting...more
Antoine Georges (Professor of Collège de France and at Ecole Polytechnique)
10 January 2014, 11:15 to 12:15
Faculty Hall, IISc, Bangalore
Lecture-1 : Quantum Matter from Hot Superconductors to Cold Atoms. Date : January 10, 2014 Time : 11:15 - 12:30 HRS (IST) Venue: Faculty Hall, IISc, Bangalore Lecture-2 : Understanding and Controlling Materials with Strong Electronic Correlations: Recent Advances from Dynamical Mean-Field Theory...more
Sankar Das Sarma (Univeristy of Maryland, USA)
19 December 2012, 16:30 to 17:30
Auditorium, New Physical Sciences Building, IISc
These lectures will cover three modern topics in physics: graphene, quantum computation, and Majorana fermions. Graphene is a two-dimensional Dirac material existing in nature where the energy dispersion follows the chiral massless Dirac-Weyl equation. It has very intriguing properties which will...more
Nima Arkani-Hamed (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA)
25 September 2012, 16:00 to 17:00
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA
Lecture 1 - 25 Sep 2012, 04:00 PM Seminar Hall, ICTS, IISc campus, Bangalore Lecture 2 - 26 Sep 2012, 04:00 PM Seminar Hall, ICTS, IISc campus, Bangalore Lecture 3 - 27 Sep 2012, 04:00 PM Seminar Hall, ICTS, IISc campus, Bangalore Discussion Meetingmore
Satya Majumdar (Directeur de Recherche in CNRS)
27 January 2012, 16:00 to 17:00
New Physical Sciences Building Auditorium, IISc, Bangalore
Random matrices were first introduced by Wishart (1928) in the statistics literature to describe the covariance matrix of large data sets. In physics literature, Wigner introduced random matrices to describe the highly excited energy levels of large complex nuclei. Random matrix theory (RMT) proved...more
Uriel Frisch (Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur Universite de Nice-Sophia Antipolis)
12 December 2011, 16:00 to 17:00
Faculty Hall, IISc, Bangalore
Over the last few years direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulence have achieved, in extreme cases, spatial resolutions of 32K squared collocation points in 2D and 4K cubed points in 3D. In the past it was deemed not necessary in DNS simulations to exceed double precision (roughly 16...more
Dam Thanh Son (University of Washington,)
21 March 2011, 16:00 to 17:00
AG 66, TIFR, Mumbai
Gauge/gravity duality, discovered in string theory in 1997, has became a powerful theoretical tool in the study of quantum field theories at strong coupling. I will review recent attempts to use gauge/gravity duality to understand the physics of strongly interacting media, focusing on the quark...more
Subir Sachdev (Harvard University)
06 December 2010, 16:00 to 17:00
Faculty Hall, IISc, Bangalore
Quantum mechanics was developed in the early twentieth century to describe the motion of a single electron in a hydrogen atom. Later, Einstein and others pointed out that the quantum theory of a pair of electrons had non-intuitive features which they found unpalatable: two well-separatedelectrons...more
Ludwig Dmitrievich Faddeev (Steklov Mathematical Institute)
23 November 2010, 16:00 to 17:00
AG 66, TIFR, Mumbai
" I present my own point of view on the main goal of mathematical physics. It is not the proof of theorems of results known to theoretical physicists. Rather it is the use of the mathematical intuition to deal with problems which arise in physics. This satement is illustrated by several examples...more
Lyman Page (Princeton University)
06 April 2010, 16:00 to 17:00
AG 66, TIFR, Mumbai
We now have a well established standard model of cosmology that agrees with virtually all cosmological observations regardless of the method or the object under study. The model indicates that the universe today comprises 5% atoms, 23% dark matter, and 72% dark energy. The model assumes a...more

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